Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, August 22, 2001

Ann Losiya knows all about hunger -- the gnawing pain that reaches up from the empty pit of her stomach, the dizzy spells and the terrible headaches.

And she knows the fear that comes from not knowing when she'll be able to eat again.

Until she enrolled in school three years ago in Kenya, Ann was just one of 300 million of the world's children who, in the age of multibillion-dollar missile defense systems, still suffer chronic hunger.

So when Ann sits down on the cracked wooden school bench and places a steaming hot bowl of red beans carefully down in front of her, her smile tells it all.

"These days I feel lucky to know that I will get food every day," she said.

If former American presidential candidates Bob Dole and George McGovern -- who sponsored the U.S. school lunch program in the 1970s -- have their way, a new door of opportunity will open for millions more of the world's hungry children.

Dole and McGovern have put their combined clout and prestige behind a bill before Congress that seeks a $750 million grant to provide free lunches around the world. If the bill is passed, U.S. agricultural surpluses will provide one nutritious meal a day to 20 million children. The U.S. Agency for International Development will ship the surpluses to countries in need, and the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) will handle distribution and monitoring.

But the plan, which would expand a $300 million pilot program created by former President Bill Clinton, faces an uncertain future with George W. Bush in the White House.

"It's not going to be easy," said David Carle, spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., one of the bill's co-sponsors. "But the fact that Republicans in and out of Congress and George McGovern are going to be making appeals to the administration gives us a good chance eventually, whether it's this year or later."

The bill's backers hope to get it passed as part of a farm bill that Congress will consider when it reconvenes next month.

For beneficiaries of the existing school feeding program, the free lunch has had a profound effect.

"I used to think that life was simply about finding food and that nothing else was important," said Ann, the daughter of nomadic herders. "But now that I am given food every day, I can start to think about other things, like education, a job and maybe money."

For as little as 11 cents a day, 3 million children get a free lunch that not only puts food in their stomachs but helps raise the level of education in many countries.

"Whenever and wherever we introduce a school feeding program, enrollment rates in those schools increase dramatically," said Lindsey Davies, a WFP information officer.

In Kenya's northern Turkana district, where Ann hails from, within one year of the introduction of school feeding in the mid-1980s, girls' attendance increased 130 percent, while boys' attendance rose by 60 percent. In one primary school in the southern Kajiado district, where school feeding was introduced in 1996, attendance soared 250 percent.

"School feeding makes plain common sense," said Davies. "Educated children and an educated workforce are the only way that we can help developing countries get past that stage where they're stuck in a rut and constantly need aid."

While the economy of Kenya's arid north is gradually opening up, there still are few job opportunities, even for the educated. Many end up migrating to the cities in search of work, and only those who enter the civil service or local administrations end up putting the skills they learned at school to work in their local districts.

But some rise above the constraints of the economy.

One beneficiary of Kenya's school feeding program who is all too aware of how his life might otherwise have been is world-class athlete Paul Tergat -- a five-time consecutive winner of the world cross-country championships, five- time Olympian and world championship silver medalist and a wealthy man.

Tergat has lent his name to help promote WFP's school feeding program.

"Ninety percent of the people around here were really, really in a bad condition, to the extent that having two meals a day was a big luxury," he said. "Quite a number of kids were dropping out of school because they didn't have enough to eat."

But once school feeding began, Tergat noticed the opposite: "Many of the kids went to school simply because they knew that in school they were able to get something to eat.

"The return that comes from this program is enormous. It cannot be underestimated."

The aid program is also expected to benefit the United States. By giving away surplus farm products, which depress prices, the program eventually will increase prices for farmers. And the aid program could open up markets for U.S.

products among the recipient countries.

In Kenya, the feeding program is slowly changing not just individual lives but also some basic assumptions of the society.

Ten-year-old Alice Lomodei just enrolled in school last year. Alice, who is from the same nomadic Turkana tribe as Ann, has spent most of her young life wandering the semi-desert of northern Kenya with her family and their livestock in search of water and grazing land.

Once every two days, the family would eat. Wild fruits and nuts were supplemented with blood and milk from their animals. With no education, Alice would be married off at the age of 12, probably to an old man with one or two wives,, in return for a dowry of animals.

By 18, when most children are leaving school and starting their own lives, Alice would have had three or four children and, in her words, "would have become old early."

"My parents were not very happy about me going to school," she said. "They wanted me to stay home looking after the animals and fetching water."

Alice's decision, applied worldwide, could make a huge difference in population growth as well as individual lives, said McGovern, who is now the U. S. representative to the U.N. Food and Agriculture program in Rome.

The former senator from South Dakota said that young girls who do not go to school and instead stay home and get married have an average of six children before they are 20 years old, whereas girls who go to school and marry several years later have an average of 2.9 children.

"My mother was under a lot of pressure from my uncles to marry me off so that they would get more animals, but thankfully she was a strong woman who realized the importance of education," said Lerole. "She knew that I would be fed if I went to school and by receiving an education my life would be free of the shackles that harnessed her."